Listen to the first four minutes of this podcast episode about one of the most successful investors of the past 75 years and fill in the blanks to the transcript below. Please note that some of the blanks are expressions and not just single words!
The transcript is available at the link below, so don't read it if you want to do this listening comprehension exercise!
You can check your answers below this excerpt or by reading the transcript at WSJ afterwards.
WSJ Podcasts | The Journal | The Life of One of Wall Street's Greatest Investors | May 16, 2024
Ryan Knutson: Who's the greatest investor of all time? Our colleague, Greg Zuckerman says the _______________(1) probably belongs to someone you might not have heard of, Jim Simons. Over the course of his decades-long _______________(2) Simons and his firm, Renaissance Technologies, produced returns that were out of this _______________(3).
Greg Zuckerman: 66% a year. No one's ever come close. I'm not sure anyone will come close. So for all those reasons, he became really a _______________(4) individual, both in the world of finance but elsewhere.
Ryan Knutson: I mean, there are household names out there like Warren Buffett, and he's _______________(5) than him.
Greg Zuckerman: There's a strong _______________(6) that he's better than Buffett. His returns are better than Buffett. His returns, his annual returns are _______________(7).
Ryan Knutson: Simons was a mathematician, and he took those skills and _______________(8) them to Wall Street, becoming one of the first investors to use computers and computer _______________(9) to make investment decisions, ushering in a new era of technology-driven trading on Wall Street, and he and his _______________(10) made over a hundred billion dollars in the process. Last week, Simons died at the age of 86.
Jim Simons: I did a lot of math, I made a lot of money, and I gave almost all of it away. That's the story of my life.
Ryan Knutson: Welcome to The Journal, our show about money, _______________(11), and power. I'm Ryan Knutson. It's Thursday, May 16th. Coming up on the show how Jim Simons used math to make billions. Jim Simons was born outside of Boston in 1938. He was the son of a shoe factory _______________(12). Our colleague, Greg, wrote a book about Simons, and he spent a lot of time with him _______________(13) him about his life, his math, and his money-making.
Greg Zuckerman: And early on, Jim had a love of numbers and mathematics, and one day he kind of shared that with his family doctor and his family doctor said, "Don't even think about that as a career. You can't make money in mathematics."
Ryan Knutson: Don't be a _______________(14), basically?
Greg Zuckerman: Yeah, or teach or do anything with math. The _______________(15), of course, is that Jim passed away worth about $30 billion, so the doctor had it wrong.
Ryan Knutson: So never listen to your doctor, that's the lesson here.
Greg Zuckerman: At least when it comes to career stuff. Jim didn't listen to his doctor later on in life too. He was a chain smoker. So yeah, he generally _______________(16) his doctor, it seems like.
Ryan Knutson: Despite his doctor's advice, Simons _______________(17) math as a career. He got his PhD and went on to teach at several _______________(18), including MIT and Harvard. During the Cold War, Simons briefly worked for the US government on code _______________(19). And by the end of his career in academia, Greg says, Simon's work led to _______________(20) in physics, quantum computing, drug development, and even artificial intelligence.
Greg Zuckerman: He goes down as one of the greatest geometers of the past 100, 200 years. If that was all he did in his life, he'd still be _______________(21) of a lot of acclaim and the _______________(22). So as I wrote my book about Jim and his firm, I had this concept I had to explain to readers. And _______________(23), I couldn't figure it out, at least on a level where I could actually understand it, so I could explain it. And he was kind enough to _______________(24) for me. Let me read to you from his email. I had asked him, what is Holonomy? "Holonomy may be defined as _______________(25) transport of tangent vectors around closed curves in _______________(26) dimensional curved spaces."
Ryan Knutson: I'm sorry, this is dumbed down?
Greg Zuckerman: That's what I was about to say. This is Jim Simons dumbing down a _______________(27) in geometry. So yeah, listen, quite seriously, he _______________(28). He can have the drink with you and the smoke, but he _______________(29) when it comes to most areas of intellectual _______________(30).
Ryan Knutson: By his late thirties, Simons had _______________(31) his reputation in the world of mathematics. So his colleagues were _______________(32) when, in 1978, he decided to give it all up to try his hand at investing.
-- ANSWERS -- ANSWERS -- ANSWERS -- ANSWERS -- ANSWERS --
1. title
2. career
3. world
4. groundbreaking
5. better
6. argument
7. unmatched
8. applied
9. algorithms
10. firm
11. business
12. executive
13. interviewing
14. mathematician
15. irony
16. ignored
17. pursued
18. institutions
19. breaking
20. advances
21. worthy
22. accolades
23. for the life of me
24. dumb it down
25. parallel
26. multiple
27. basic concept
28. operates on another level
29. leaves you in the dust
30. pursuit
31. cemented
32. baffled